Finding Topics to Write About: 7 Lessons from America’s Greatest Writing Coach
Mark Joseph Aduana
Content marketer & ghostwriter | 500+ content assets ghostwritten for 15 founders & execs (SaaS & Digital Marketing Agencies) in America, Europe & the Middle East
“Donald Murray, in my opinion, is the most influential writing teacher America has ever known.” - Roy Peter Clark
Donald was a paratrooper during World War II and later wrote for?The Boston?newspaper, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing.
For 15 years, Donald has had to find a topic for his weekly column. Most weeks he knows exactly what to write about, but there are also weeks when he’s facing the weekly deadline and has nothing to say.
In his book,?The Craft of Revision,?Donald shared his techniques to find ideas for his column.
Here they are:
#1 Take a piece of paper and capture every idea that occurs to you.
“I begin brainstorming by putting down anything that comes to mind,” Donald writes, “even if its stupid, embarrassing, or not related to the territory I hope to explore in writing.”
Donald writes the obvious first, capturing what comes next without censoring himself.
Here’s an example:
After a 5-minute brainstorming session, he reads what he has written and asks himself:
What surprises me?
Two things stood out for him from the list: ‘importance of automobile conversations’ and ‘lichen on fence post’
What connects?
“Da vinci quotation, lichen, limits, not waiting in the car while shopping, limits, conversation.”
Out of all the items on the list,?lichen?itches him the most. “I need to explore that,” he writes. “So I start making a list about lichen that grows into an unexpected poem.”
#2 Ask yourself questions
Donald asks himself questions to discover what he knows that others may need to know, what he knows that he needs to understand more fully, and what he doesn’t know he knows until it is explored by writing.
Here are some questions he asks himself:
He doesn’t worry about grammar, spelling, or clarity. He only focuses on capturing ideas.
After writing answers to the questions, Donald suggests taking note of ideas that are unexpected or uncommon.
“Pay close attention to anything that surprises you,” he writes, “that is different from what you expected. Follow the surprise or connection in your mind or on paper to see where your thinking may take you.”
#3 Explore different points of view
“I don’t just plunge in and write the obvious response to an assignment or writing task even when I am on deadline,” writes Donald.
He explores an idea from different points of view.
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Then, he?circles?the point of view that best serves his reader.
“I write a weekly newspaper column, memoir, textbooks, poems, novels, essays, and in each case, I rewrite before I write by imagining?different stories I could tell?and the?different ways I might tell them.”
#4 Write fragments with conflict, tension, contradiction.
Explore?instigating lines?or?fragments?that contain conflict, tension, contradiction, irony, and unexpected ideas. Instigating lines are rarely sentences. Sometimes they’re just a word. Each carries an idea that can be developed into a full-blown piece.
The word?hero, for example.
“I was in combat in World War II as a paratrooper,” Donald writes, “and I hate the casual use of the word “hero” for veterans of my generation. Few of us were heroes. In fact, many soldiers I served with who wanted to be heroes did stupid things that were both ineffective and betrayed our position, like standing up with a machine gun and firing at the enemy. I don’t want to go into combat with heroes.”
The line is personal.
The line may not make sense to someone, but it can have a strong meaning to you. “The line reflects our personal experience and private response to the world,” he writes.
“Reye’s Syndrome is a rare disease that killed my 20-year-old daughter. Those two words are packed with enough meaning that I wrote a book,?The Lively Shadow,?about losing her and surviving that loss.”
#5 Ask What ifs
“Our world is full of?what ifs?that may produce new visions, new ideas,” Donald writes.
Here are some of the?What ifs?that Donald loves to explore:
Feel free to create your own list of?what if?questions for the piece you’re working on.
“To imagine, you have to disconnect your mind from all that is expected, responsible, logical, proper. Most of the what ifs will not be followed but then one will make the ordinary strange and your draft will lead you where you never expected to go. This is the adventure of writing.”
#6 Play with Images
Donald loves to play with images when looking for a subject to write about. He explores memorable scenes and relives and experiences them again through writing.
“It is as if I were watching a movie in which I was one of the actors,” he writes.
Then he captures the ideas that are triggered by those images. Sometimes, they lead him to an idea for his next piece of writing.
“When I recall the memories of watching my first grandchild learning to walk, his stumbles, his getting up and trying again, I remember the strong image of watching his mother — my daughter — take her first steps. And then I remember all the difficult first steps I have taken in my life.”
These difficult first steps can become a theme for Donald’s new poem, essay, or column.
#7 Connect related ideas.
Find connections between ideas to create new meaning.
As James Webb Young writes, “A new idea is nothing more than a new combination of old elements.”
When Donald was revising a chapter of his book, he connected rewriting to prewriting. “I didn’t think the connection would hold,” he wrote. “But it has and I have used this idea, new to me, and offer it to you.”
Happy Writing,
Mark